France.L'Amarante · the object over a biologist's garden in Nancy

On Thursday 21 October 1982, at about 18:00, a married couple came to the gendarmerie station in a suburb on the outskirts of Nancy. The husband, a 30-year-old biologist who asked for anonymity and whom the official file cites under a pseudonym, stated that that same morning, at about 12:35, while in the garden in front of his house, he saw a bright object arrive from the south-east that he first took for an aircraft. The sky was clear and the Sun was not in his eyes. The object came down slowly until it was above him; the witness stepped back three or four metres and saw it clearly: an ovoid shape a metre and a half across and eighty centimetres thick, with the lower half metallic-looking, like polished beryllium, and the upper half a lagoon blue-green colour. It stayed suspended a metre above the ground for twenty minutes, silent and giving off no heat, cold or any other perceptible signal.

The witness came within fifty centimetres of it. He went upstairs for his camera, but when he tried to take a picture it jammed; he specified that it had failed before. After the twenty minutes, the object suddenly rose vertically, very fast, 'as if by a strong suction', until it was lost from view. It left no marks on the ground, but the witness noticed that the grass stood up as it left and quickly returned to its position. That evening, back home, he found that a group of amaranths in the garden, a few centimetres from where the object had been, had withered, and linked it to what he had seen. The next day the gendarmerie came back to take samples and sent a telex to GEPAN, the French space agency's aerospace phenomena study group, which decided to investigate.

The investigators arrived on 29 October and ran into a problem: the witness had tidied the garden, and the amaranth bed had been pulled up two days earlier. GEPAN reconstructed the scene, measured the garden, analysed the witness's account and took a second series of samples. Its technical note no. 17, dated 21 March 1983, devotes a chapter to the lifting of the grass: an experimental study concluded that only an electric field of at least 30 kV/m, able to produce a corona effect at the tips of the blades, could lift fifteen-centimetre grass. If such a field existed as the object left, some sixteen centimetres from the flower bed, it would there have exceeded 200 kV/m and could have caused a strong current discharge through the vegetation. The note warns that this cannot be stated to be the cause of the withering, but that it is a clue to be considered.

The samples were sent to the Plant Physiology Centre of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. The biochemical analyses gave no conclusive results: the first samples had not been kept at a low enough temperature and the amaranths had already been pulled up. The researchers noted that the nearby weather station had recorded a sub-zero temperature and light mist the day before, which might have dried the leaves of the plants set against a railing. GEPAN concluded that the observing conditions the witness describes were very good —in broad daylight, for minutes, at close range and from several angles—, that if there was an error it must have been enormous and that the analysis of his account revealed no tendency to distort what was perceived; but, with a single witness, there was no way to confirm it.

L'Amarante is one of the two cases GEPAN investigated as a physical-trace study in its early years, along with Trans-en-Provence (↗), and together they defined how an official body could study a sighting with laboratory tools: a gendarmerie statement, plant samples, biochemical analyses, a reconstruction of the site and a physical model of the effects. Technical note no. 17 is a remarkable document for its candour: it does not exaggerate what it found and explains in detail why it could not find more.

The case has a clear strength and a clear weakness. The strength is the quality of the observation reported: a scientist, in broad daylight, half a metre from an object for twenty minutes, with nothing that could easily be mistaken for an aircraft, a balloon or a celestial body. The weakness is structural: there is a single witness, the camera failed, the plants were pulled up before the investigators arrived and the samples were poorly preserved. Everything physical about the case —the withering, the lifted grass— ultimately depends on the testimony or on remains that could no longer be analysed, and the frost of the previous day offers a plausible natural explanation for the state of the plants. The electric-field calculation is ingenious, but it starts by accepting the account in order to deduce what would be needed to produce what it describes; it is not independent evidence.

That is why the case enters at level A for the quality of the official investigation, with a partition that leaves a broad undetermined share and divides the rest between a natural explanation for the traces and the hypothesis of an unidentified phenomenon. GEIPAN keeps it in its D category, that of cases that remain unidentified after a consistent investigation. For the corpus, it is also a lesson in method that GEPAN itself wrote: without proper sampling and preservation protocols, even the best trace case remains a clue.